The world today, not in the least Europe, is facing an unprecedented crisis. There is more food to eat, more ideology, sexual permissiveness, exhaustive laws, regularization of banking and other financial institutions, and, Slavoj Žižek argues, more privacy. Yet, the level of disbelief and frustration with regard to hunger, sexuality, law and order, the economic situation, politics, and the notion of public space is palpable. Is this not just because we continue to be seduced by a patchwork of easy but wrong answers but because the allure of those answers leads us to asking the wrong questions? Žižek illumines a dense path through the works of Daphne du Maurier, Jean Pierre Melville's The Army of Shadows, the films of Lubitsch, the place of violence in the Buddhist system of moral conduct, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, the assertion that Ghandi was more violent than Hitler, pedophilia in the Church, the maternal aspect of North Korean leaders, the crisis in Cyprus and Greece, the larger economic meltdown and its denial by the very people who are responsible for it. In the process, we are invited to question some of these answers, and to return to the questions. Žižek then goads us to develop tools that might help not only in reframing the questions but make us look at at the very frame with skepticism.
Author
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992). Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."
